When people talk about the P-51 Mustang, they usually talk about how it saved the bombing campaign and won the air war over Europe.
And that’s true.
It did.
But what most people don’t realize is that winning the air war was actually the beginning of the worst part for Mustang pilots, not the end.
You see, nearly 80% of Mustangs lost during the war weren’t shot down by enemy fighters.
The real killer was something else entirely, and you’re about to understand why.
This is the story most people never hear about the legendary P-51 Mustang.
So, let’s start from the very beginning.
When the Second World War began, the American military had a very specific idea about how air power was supposed to work.
Fighters and bombers were seen as completely different weapons meant for completely different jobs.
Fighters, which the Americans still called pursuit aircraft well into the 1940s, were considered defensive tools.
Their job was to intercept enemy bombers if they ever came to attack American territory.
Bombers, on the other hand, were the offensive arm.
The entire strategic vision of the Army Airore was built around the belief that fleets of heavy bombers could fly deep into enemy territory, destroy factories and infrastructure, and win wars without the bloody ground campaigns that had defined the First World War.
Now, the theory behind this was called daylight precision bombing, and it had been developed during the 1930s.
The Americans rejected the British approach of nighttime area bombing because they believed that a new piece of technology called the Nordon bomb site would allow them to hit specific factories from high altitude with great accuracy.
But more importantly, they believed that the B17 flying fortress, armed with up to 1350 caliber machine guns, could defend itself against enemy fighters when flying in large formations.
The idea of building a true long range escort fighter wasn’t even seriously considered because most planners thought it was technically impossible at the time.
So in 1943, the United States Army Air Forces launched their strategic bombing campaign over Europe based on this doctrine, flying from bases in England.
And by the summer of that year, this doctrine was being written in the burning wreckage of B7s scattered across the German countryside.
You see, bomber self-defense simply didn’t work.
Loss rates climbed to 8% per mission in the spring, and by autumn, the offensive was losing aircraft at a rate that no military force could sustain for long.
The average B7’s life expectancy dropped to just 11 missions.
At the standard loss rate, the chances of completing the required 25 mission combat tour were roughly 14%.
Now, just pause for a moment and think about what that actually means.
For every 10 crewmen who flew over Germany, eight of them would be dead, missing, or captured.
Let that sink in.
During what became known as Black Week, twothirds of the B7s sent on missions deep into German territory were either shot down or came back so badly damaged they couldn’t fly again.
Hundreds of crew members were killed and hundreds more were captured after parachuting over enemy territory.
Someone calculated that at this rate an entirely new bomber force would have to be created almost every 3 months just to keep the current level of operations going.
So the obvious solution was fighter escort.
and the Allies did have fighters in England.
The P47 Thunderbolt had arrived in early 1943 and the P38 Lightning was supposed to follow, but both aircraft had crippling limitations that prevented them from actually solving the problem.
The British Spitfire had the same issue.
None of these fighters could reach deep enough into Germany to protect the bombers where they needed protection the most.
The P47 Thunderbolt carried 305 gall of internal fuel, but its massive radial engine burned through that fuel at roughly 100 gall per hour at combat power.
This gave it a combat radius on internal fuel alone of just 165 mi.
Even with the 75gal drop tanks that were first used in 1943, the P47’s escort range only extended to the western border of Germany, about 250 mi from English bases.
Berlin was about 600 mi away.
There was simply no chance of escorting bombers deep into enemy territory and still having enough fuel left over to actually fight.
Drop tanks seemed like the answer, and in fact, they were the answer.
But the technology didn’t work well with the available fighters.
The concept was simple enough.
You hang external fuel tanks under the wings or fuselage, burn that fuel first, then drop the empty tanks before combat.
But drop tanks alone couldn’t solve the fundamental problem.
The P47 was just too thirsty.
One calculation showed that the Thunderbolt burned roughly 260 gallons to cover 600 miles, while the Mustang needed only 108 gallons for the same distance.
So, the fighter that would eventually save the bombing campaign was already being compared favorably to the others.
But at this point, it didn’t even exist in its final form yet.
And here’s where the story takes an unexpected turn.
Because the aircraft that would change everything came into existence for a completely different reason.
3 years before the catastrophic bomber losses in early 1940, Britain was facing desperate shortages of fighter aircraft and simply couldn’t sustain production on their own.
They approached an American company called North American Aviation and asked them to produce P40 Warhawks under license to help fill the gap.
But North American had a better idea.
They told the British they could design and build an entirely new fighter that would be even better than the Warhawk, which was already becoming obsolete anyway.
and they claimed they could do it in the same time it would take to retool their factory for Warhawk production.
They promised to deliver this new fighter in under 120 days, which was an incredibly short time frame for something they had never done before.
And they actually beat their own deadline, producing the prototype in just 12 days.
What North American delivered was an aerodynamically advanced airframe that cut drag almost in half compared to other fighters of the time.
It was faster than any competitor using the same engine.
However, the engine was actually the problem.
North American fitted the prototype with the liquid cooled Allison engine producing roughly 1,000 horsepower.
But this engine was optimized for low and medium altitudes.
And at the heights where bombers operated, typically above 20,000 ft, its power output dropped dramatically.
Because of this engine limitation, the early Mustang wasn’t seen as a potential solution for the bomber escort problem.
The first Mustangs that arrived in England were used for low-level ground attacks and reconnaissance missions.
They could reach targets in Germany from England at lower altitudes.
But that was about all the Mustang could do at this point.
It was a good aircraft stuck with the wrong engine for the job that needed doing.
Then in April 1942, something happened that would change everything.
A test pilot for Rolls-Royce named Ronald Harker was invited to fly the new Mustang that was now serving in the Royal Air Force.
Harker was impressed with the aircraft and he understood its limitations, but he also got an idea.
He thought that if the Mustang were fitted with the powerful Merlin engine that the new Spitfire was using, it could unlock the aircraft’s true potential.
At first, there was strong resistance from the decision makers because the Merlin was already fully allocated to British aircraft, and there simply weren’t any to spare.
But eventually they agreed to give it a chance and an experimental Mustang was fitted with a Merlin engine, a new two-stage supercharger that Rolls-Royce had developed and a four-bladed propeller.
The results exceeded everyone’s expectations.
The Mustang with the Merlin engine reached a 40,000 ft ceiling and achieved 433 mph.
You see, this engine maintained its power at altitudes where the Allison’s outputs simply collapsed.
Once these results came in, Merlin engine production quickly shifted under license to America, and production of this revolutionary new variant of the Mustang began in earnest.
The new aircraft carried at first four and then six 50 caliber machine guns with a total of 1,880 rounds.
Later models added the bubble canopy, which removed the blind spots of older framed canopies that had blocked visibility pilots needed during dog fights.
But the real advantage was range.
The Mustang’s higher internal fuel capacity combined with its much better fuel efficiency gave it range that no fighter of the time could match.
And then came the final piece of the puzzle.
Those drop tanks that had been tried with other fighters were now fitted to the Mustang.
With two 108gal drop tanks, the P-51B could reach over a,000 mi and return.
That was more than enough to fly all the way to Berlin, protect the bombers over the target, engage in dog fights with German interceptors, and then fly back while attacking targets of opportunity along the way.
The solution to the bomber crisis had finally arrived.
But for the pilots who would fly this aircraft, the hardest part was just about to begin.
The first Merlin powered Mustangs reached Europe in November 1943, and they went straight to work.
The 354th Fighter Group received them first, and the Eighth Air Force immediately borrowed these aircraft for escort duty because the need was desperate.
It didn’t take long for the Mustang to overtake both the P38 and the P47 in numbers.
Units across the Air Force pushed hard to convert to the new fighter as quickly as possible, and in some cases, this happened faster than it probably should have.
Some pilots were literally learning to fly the Mustang on the way to the target.
Men who had spent less than a day in the cockpit found themselves escorting bombers deep into Germany with enemy fighters waiting for them.
So, how did these missions actually look like? A typical escort run from England into Germany and back lasted somewhere between 4 and 6 hours.
The day started before dawn with briefings where pilots learned the target, the route where they would meet up with the bomber stream and what kind of opposition to expect.
Then they suited up in heavy flight gear, fleece line jackets, boots, and thick gloves because temperatures at 25,000 ft dropped to minus40°.
Takeoff happened in groups with fighters forming up over England before heading out across the channel.
Once over hostile territory, the hours stretched on.
Pilots watched their fuel gauges constantly while scanning the sky for enemy fighters and the bombers they were supposed to protect.
Fuel management was critical and had to follow a precise sequence.
The fuselage tank needed to be burned down early because when it was full, it shifted the aircraft’s center of gravity dangerously backward and made the Mustang unstable.
Standard procedure was to get that tank mostly empty before expecting any combat.
When enemy fighters appeared, the first thing a pilot did was dump his drop tanks.
A simple lever release them and down they tumbled.
Those external tanks created drag and limited how sharply the aircraft could turn, so nobody wanted them attached during a dog fight.
Once combat started, those tanks had to go, and the aircraft fought on internal fuel with full agility.
The fighting itself was brief and violent with engagements lasting minutes or sometimes only seconds.
Pilots described the chaos as almost impossible to process in the moment, trying to track fast-moving aircraft while knowing that someone was trying to do the same to them.
The 650 caliber machine guns delivered tremendous firepower, but they required accurate aim to be effective against a maneuvering target.
The physical toll built up over time.
Hours cramped in a cockpit at high altitude, breathing through an oxygen mask, extreme cold, and then the adrenaline crash after combat all contributed to horrific exhaustion.
Losing friends became routine with some units losing more than half of their pilots during 1944 alone.
We should probably mention Major George Prey here, who became the highest scoring Mustang ace of the war with 27 aerial victories.
Prey had survived countless dog fights and become the deadliest P-51 pilot in the entire war.
Then on Christmas Day 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge, he was chasing a German fighter at low altitude when American anti-aircraft gunners mistook his Mustang for an enemy plane.
They opened fire and shot him down.
Prey was hit by 50 caliber machine gun rounds and his femoral artery was severed, so he was likely already unconscious before hitting the ground.
The Luftwaffer, on the other side, was struggling with a problem of its own making.
German fighter units had spent months building themselves up specifically to destroy bombers, and when their original armament wasn’t powerful enough to bring down B7s quickly, they added more guns.
20 mm cannons were mounted under the wings of the BF109.
The FW190 went even further with variants carrying four 20 mm cannons plus two heavy machine guns.
Some dedicated bomber destroyer versions mounted 30 mm cannons or unguided rockets.
All of this extra firepower was devastating against heavy bombers.
But those additional guns added weight and drag, and fighters that had once been nimble were now flying like overloaded trucks.
When the Mustang arrived in force, this became a disaster for the Germans.
The P-51 could outmaneuver these heavily laden aircraft at any altitude above 20,000 ft.
The American fighter doctrine changed at the same time and together these factors broke the back of German air power.
Previously, escort fighters had stayed close to the bomber formations, driving off attackers but not pursuing them.
The Luftwaffer exploited this by waiting until the escorts turned back for fuel, then attacking.
Under the new doctrine introduced in early 1944, Mustangs flew ahead of the bomber stream by 50 to 100 miles, clearing the skies before the bombers arrived.
After escort duty over the target, pilots were free to chase Germans wherever they fled, strafe airfields, and hit targets of opportunity on the way home.
Bomber crews hated it at first because they wanted their escorts close, but the results were devastating.
In February 1944, an operation called Big Weak deliberately targeted German aircraft factories, forcing the Luftvafa to come up and defend them.
German fighters rose to protect the factories and flew straight into swarms of Mustangs waiting for them.
The Luftwaffer lost 355 fighters during big week alone and their operational strength dropped by half.
The Luftwaffer couldn’t recover.
Pilot training time was slashed from 300 hours to as few as 75 in desperate attempts to fill cockpits.
By early 1944, Germany was producing only about 26 new pilots per month, while America trained 29,000 that same year.
German novice pilots went up against American veterans and died in large numbers.
The fuel shortage only made everything even worse for the Germans.
By April 1945, the Luftvafa had essentially ceased to exist.
However, there was one aircraft that American pilots were warned to avoid at all costs.
The Messid 262 was the world’s first operational jet fighter and the most dangerous thing the Luftvafer put into the air.
It reached roughly 530 mph, almost 100 mph faster than the Mustang.
and its 430 mm cannons could tear apart a B17 in seconds, let alone little Mustang fighter.
Pilots were told not to engage unless they had surprise or a major altitude advantage.
But the jet had weaknesses because those pioneering engines were fragile and didn’t accelerate quickly at low speeds.
Allied pilots learned to wait near known jet bases and catch the 262s coming into land, slow and vulnerable.
Despite some impressive kills by German jet pilots, the MI262 came too late and in too few numbers.
Only about 1,400 were built and fewer than 300 saw actual combat.
You might think that with the Luftwaffer defeated and the jets failing to change the outcome, Mustang pilots could breathe a little easier.
But believe me, the truth is that the most dangerous phase of their war was just beginning.
Because as enemy fighters disappeared from the sky, strafing ground targets became the primary mission.
And we’re going to show you why this was actually far worse than fighting the German fighters ever was.
First, take a look at this.
When a P47 Thunderbolt took damage, roughly eight out of 10 made it back to base.
For the P38 Lightning, it was 7 out of 10.
But for the Mustang, only 6 out of 10 survived damage to return.
The P-51 was being lost to ground fire at almost three times the rate of the air cooled P-47.
The thing is that the Mustang’s Merlin engine was liquid cooled, which means it depended on an intact cooling system to function.
Everything from the coolant jacket to the radiators to the tubing had to stay intact.
A single bullet through any of these components meant the coolant would spill out and the engine would overheat and seize.
The pilot might have 10 to 20 minutes of flight time before that happened, and if friendly territory was further away than that, he simply wasn’t going to make it.
The P47’s air cooled radial engine, on the other hand, sat at the front of the aircraft like a 2400lb block of steel and aluminum.
No cooling system to puncture, and the engine itself acted as a shield.
And if you’re wondering how much firepower the Germans had pointed at the sky, the numbers were quite staggering.
Their anti-aircraft organization employed over a million personnel operating around 9,000 heavy guns, mostly 88 mm flack cannons and 30,000 lighter guns in 20 and 37 mm calibers.
Trains became especially deadly targets because guns were mounted on dedicated flack cars, often in quad or double configurations.
To hit a ground target, a pilot had to fly straight and level at under 500 ft.
He needed that stable approach to spot the target, aim, and fire effectively.
But this gave flat gunners a clear shot at an aircraft that couldn’t maneuver.
Making a second pass at the same target was considered a death sentence because the gunners knew exactly where the plane was going to be.
At those altitudes, there was no possibility of bailing out.
A pilot hit at 200 ft, didn’t have time to release his canopy, get clear of the aircraft, and let his parachute open before hitting the ground.
Of roughly 2500 P-51s lost during the war, only about 550 were confirmed shot down by enemy aircraft.
The rest, nearly 80% fell to flack, strafing accidents, and mechanical failures.
For those who survived being shot down, the new horrors continued.
Starting in 1943, propaganda minister Joseph Gerbles had launched a campaign that replaced words like pilot and air crew with terms like terrafleager, terror flyers, and luft gangster.
Air gangsters.
The propaganda claimed Allied airmen were criminals collecting bounties for killing civilians.
In August of that year, Hinrich Himmler ordered SS and police forces not to intervene in confrontations between locals and downed airmen.
This was basically a license to murder any surviving Allied airmen parachuting over German territory.
At least 3,000 cases of lynch justice were documented, and over a thousand Allied airmen were killed this way.
Those who avoided the mobs and made it into the prisoner of war system found conditions that were far from comfortable.
Many airmen liberated at the end of the war weighed barely 90 lb.
But when fighting in Europe seized, the war wasn’t finished.
And neither was the Mustang story.
Across the world in the Pacific, a different kind of horror was waiting.
One that had nothing to do with enemy fighters or anti-aircraft guns.
The capture of Ewima in March 1945 changed everything for the P-51.
This tiny volcanic island sat 790 mi south of Tokyo, and once it was in American hands, Japan itself was finally within fighter range, although barely.
The missions that flew from Ewima became known as very long range operations, and they were among the most demanding flights of the entire war.
The first VLR mission launched on April 7th, 1945.
96 Mustangs escorted a 100 B-29 bombers to targets on Honshu, and Japanese fighters rose to meet them.
In the fighting that followed, Mustang pilots claimed 21 enemy aircraft destroyed.
So far, it looked like the Pacific would offer the same kind of aerial combat that pilots had known over Europe.
But these missions were nothing like anything anyone had flown before.
A round trip from Ewima to the Tokyo area and back covered roughly 1,500 m, and almost all of it was over open water.
There were no landmarks to navigate by, no cities below, nothing but ocean in every direction for hours at a time.
Over Europe, a small navigation error might put you over the wrong town.
Over the Pacific, that same error could mean never seeing land again.
If a pilot’s heading was off by just one degree, he might fly until his fuel ran out with nothing but waves beneath him.
Now, the military did establish air sea rescue networks to give downed pilots a fighting chance.
Submarines were stationed at intervals across the ocean.
Destroyer escorts patrolled the waters.
B29s flew search patterns offshore.
and Catalina flying boats stood ready for pickup attempts.
These efforts saved dozens of airmen who would otherwise have disappeared, but many more went down too far from help or simply couldn’t be found in time.
By mid1 1945, Japanese fighters rarely came up to challenge the escorts at all.
Their army and navy air forces had been worn down to almost nothing, and what pilots they had left were inexperienced and outmatched.
The few aerial kills that occurred in those final months were almost one-sided.
But that didn’t make the missions any safer.
The worst single day in the entire history of the P-51 Mustang came on June 1st, 1945, later called Black Friday.
That morning, 184 Mustangs took off from Ewima to escort B29s hitting Osaka.
Weather reconnaissance had reported that an approaching front could be overflown at 10,000 ft.
But the assessment was wrong, and the pilots flew directly into a massive storm.
There was no way over it and no way around it.
Pilots suddenly found themselves in near zero visibility, flying blind through severe turbulence, icing, sleet, and rain.
Formations broke apart immediately.
Aircraft that had been flying together moments earlier were now alone in the chaos with no way to find each other.
And collisions within formation began.
Most pilots eventually tried to turn back, but by then the damage was done.
27 Mustangs went down that day and 24 pilots died with only one of those losses coming from enemy action.
Weather killed the rest.
It was the largest single mission loss of P-51s in the entire war, Europe or Pacific, and the Japanese had almost nothing to do with it.
The final months followed the same pattern.
Between July 1st and August 15th, 1945, 85 American fighter pilots died on very long range missions, and only a handful fell to enemy action.
Mechanical failures or pilot errors over open ocean, and weather claimed the rest.
By the time the last mission flew on August 14th, the VLR campaign had cost over 130 Mustangs and their pilots.
Perhaps the saddest final chapter of the Mustang in the Second World War was this.
First Lieutenant Felix Philip Schlamberg was 19 years old, a Jewish honor student from Brooklyn who had somehow ended up on Ewima flying P-51s in the final days of a war that everyone knew was about to end.
On the night of August 14th, 1945, he sat in a briefing at a Quonet hut with the other pilots in his unit.
The atomic bombs had already fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan’s surrender seemed like a matter of hours.
But instead of standing down, the pilots were ordered to suit up for another mission the next morning.
They would hit airfields near Tokyo.
Captain Jerry Yellen, who would lead the flight, later said that Schlamberg leaned over during the briefing and whispered to him.
He said that if he went on this mission, he wasn’t coming back.
Yelen told him to see the flight surgeon who could ground him, but Schlamberg refused.
On the morning of August 15th, 1945, while Emperor Hiito was recording his surrender announcement in a studio somewhere in Tokyo, Yelen and Schlamburgg lifted off from Ewima.
They had no idea the war was ending.
The code word Utah, which would have recalled them, never came through on their radios.
The two Mustangs found their targets and strafed the airfields as ordered and they took anti-aircraft fire on the way out.
Climbing to escape, they flew into a thick bank of clouds.
And when Yelen came out the other side, Schlamburgg wasn’t with him.
Yelen circled and searched, but found nothing.
And with his fuel running low, he had no choice but to turn back.
When he landed on Ewima, he learned that the war had been over for 3 hours.
What happened to Philip Schlamberg is something we’ll never know for certain.
He might have gotten disoriented in the clouds or he might have taken a hit from the anti-aircraft fire.
His body was never found and neither was his aircraft.
He was 19 years old.
He somehow knew he wasn’t coming back from this mission.
He was the last American to die in combat in the Second World War.
Lost on what turned out to be the final mission the country ever flew in that conflict.
When the fighting ended, nearly 15,000 Mustangs had been built.
The aircraft stayed in service for years afterward.
And when Korea erupted in 1950, the Mustang was pulled from storage and sent back to war under a new name, the F51.
It flew ground attack missions there.
Its long range still useful for operating from bases in Japan.
But the Mustang was obsolete now.
Mig 15 jets outclassed it completely, and by 1953, jets had taken over, and the Mustangs combat days were finished.
The surviving Mustangs eventually became collector’s items, restored and flown at air shows, bought and sold for enormous sums by enthusiasts who never had to take one into combat.
But it’s quite something to think about what those aircraft actually were before they became museum pieces and what the men who flew them went through so that we could win that
